The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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Mackenzie’s deeply influential aesthetic strictures were socially and politically motivated. Hence Burns is turned into a safe sentimentalist rather than, like Pope or Swift, a turbulent, dissenting satirist of the established, corrupt order. He is a naïve exception rather than, in terms of both poetry and politics, the most knowing of men. Burns was as formally naïve in poetic tradition as Mozart was in musical tradition. They were both examples of creative pieces of ground, as Blake suggests, born spaded and seeded. It was socially unacceptable for Mackenzie to grant Burns such potency. As an extension of this, he had to define Burns as a naïve innocent, coming from peasant origins. Mackenzie also down-grades the actual vernacular language of that world with its elements which bespoke the raw pleasures, pains and, indeed, turbulent discontents of the common people. If there was genuine ambivalence in Mackenzie’s attitude to Burns at the beginning of their relationship, it did not survive the poet’s death. In his résumé of the careers of Scotland three great eighteenth-century poets, Ramsay,
Fergusson and Burns, the first is praised for his achievement of prudent respectability. The latter two are not: Fergusson, dissipated and drunken, died in early life, after having produced poems faithfully and humorously describing scenes of Edinburgh and somewhat of blackguardism. Burns originally virtuous, was seduced by dissipated companions, and after he got into the Excise addicted himself to drunkenness, tho’ the rays of his genius sometimes broke through the mist of his dissipation: but the habit had got too much power over him to be overcome and it brought him, with a few lucid intervals, to an early grave. He unfortunately during the greatest part of his life had called and thought dissipation spirit, sobriety and discretion a want of it, virtues too shabby for a man of genius. His great admiration of Fergusson showed his propensity to coarse dissipation. … How different was the fate of Burns compared with that of a Poet in birth, in Education, and many other circumstances like him, tho’ I do not arrogate to him so much creative genius, Allan Ramsay. He came into notice in a Station as mean as Burns, had no advantage over him in Birth, Connections, or any other circumstances independent of his own genius alas: it was the Patronage and Companionship which Burns obtained, that changed the colour of his later life: the patronage of dissipated men of high rank, and the Companionship of clever, witty, but dissipated men of lower rank. The notice of the former flattered his vanity, and in some degree unsettled his from an anecdote to be immediately mentioned he seemed to mingle with the most amiable feelings —but the levity of his Patrons and his associates Dwelt on the Surface of his Mind and prompted some of his Poetry which offended the serious, and lost him better friends than those which that poetry had acquired —Dugald Stewart who first introduced him to me, told me latterly, that his Conduct and Manners had become so degraded that decent persons could hardly take any notice of him.27
Given Fergusson’s sweet, convivial personality and the terrible nature of his incarcerated death, Mackenzie’s vicious pursuit of him beyond the grave beggars belief. In the history of poetic biographies, Ian Hamilton has remarked that Burns was the first poet to be character assassinated. Given Mackenzie’s treatment of Fergusson, however, we would have to grant Fergusson unhappy precedence. Mackenzie tainted, wrongly, both their reputations with, at best, alcoholic tendencies. This alleged addiction was then implied to lead to other forms of licence where, certainly in Burns’s case, sexual promiscuity was on the charge sheet.
This demonisation of Burns is not to be understood, however, without it being placed in its proper political context. The Mackenzie who penned these personal attacks was the same man who was writing fervid anti-revolutionary polemics in The Edinburgh Herald during 1790–1 under the pen name ‘An Old Tradesman’ and again in 1793, in The Caledonian Mercury, under the pen name ‘Brutus’ to prove that all was for the best in the best of all worn torn, economically distressed Hanoverian worlds. As spokesperson for the old regime he believed that strong government would ‘save the people from that worst enemy of purely democratic states – the people themselves’.28 The pinnacle of his loyalty is the 1792 A Review of the Principal Proceedings of the Parliament of 1784, a defense of William Pitt, when Pitt’s pro-reformist views of 1784 were being thrown back in his face by radicals. Retrospectively referring to that pamphlet Mackenzie described the ideological clash of the 1790’s as an ‘epidemic insanity … which set up certain idols, under the names of Liberty, Equality and The Rights of Man’.29 Pitt personally thanked Mackenzie for his loyal defence, and basking in such praise, he replied ‘My Opinion, Sir, of you as a Minister I hold only in common with the Millions around me.’30 (Letter 93, To William Pitt, March 1792). These ‘millions’ were not so loyal, as Mackenzie informed George Home on 26th March 1792:
There is a Spirit of Sedition gone forth, of which it is very difficult to tell the Extent, but even if not so considerable as some timid people fear, so restless, so busy, so zealous, as to be truly alarming to every considerate Man. I forget the Calculation made of the numbers of Manufactures in England, but we all know it is very great. Of these I believe I may say a Majority, but assuredly a great part, are determined enemies to the present Order of things31 …
Theatre goers, as Mackenzie records, were among this swelling radical ‘enemy’ and in one incident he tells Home, open conflict erupted between radicals and loyalists at London’s Haymarket theatre when the revolutionary song ‘Ca Ira’ was demanded by reformers, but chanted down by loyalist calls for ‘God Save the King’. Similar tensions spread to the provincial theatres, including Dumfries and an unidentified informer reported to the Excise that Burns was in the reformist mob. Mackenzie goes on in the same letter to condemn Scottish academics: ‘From my Communication with Men of Letters here, I can perceive that they are generally on the side of the Malcontents’.32 Fanatically partisan, status obsessed, politically scared, Mackenzie so hated his reforming and radical political enemies that he could not speak their names. To do so would give them a credibility he utterly sought to deny. For Mackenzie the radical was equivalent to the bestial. This is why in Mackenzie and the subsequent Tory criticism he inspired always described Burns as surrounded by destructive groups of unnamed degenerates in Edinburgh and, even worse, Dumfries.
It should further be understood that Burns was not a unique case for such treatment. The heavily subsidised, reactionary literary, magazine and newspaper culture put together by Pitt and Dundas specialised in trashing the radical literary enemy by varied forms of abuse based on the relationship of personal licentiousness to consequent political anarchy if these people were to succeed. For example, Mary Wollstonecraft with whom Burns corresponded received treatment even worse than his, as a promiscuous woman she was even more reprehensible than a randy ploughman. Engrossed in destroying the careers of any radical sympathisers, Mackenzie boasted to the ultra-loyalist George Chalmers, in March 1793:
One thing Mr Young suggests as never yet thought of, which however was thought of here, and enforced in two short Articles in the Newspapers by myself, at the very opening of this Business, namely the resolution of not employing Jacobin Tradesmen, which had a very excellent Effect in this Town.… contrary to my Expectations, the War has I think done good in this Country, given a Sort of Impulse to the good Part of the Community …33
An ever-willing anti-reform propagandist, Mackenzie helped organise the Scottish distribution of a vicious attack, printed by the same George Chalmers, on Tom Paine as a degenerate, dangerous individual. The black art of character assassination, well established before the death of Burns, won rich patronage for the loyal Mackenzie, appointed Comptroller of Taxes in Scotland in 1799.
The degree of Mackenzie’s vindictiveness and his stress of the later Dumfries years, also alert us to one of the most pervasive and politically wilfully misconceived of myths surrounding Burns. Indeed, so pervasive that it has even penetrated the normally sceptical consciousness of